Thursday, June 7

Redefining the Classics

Children's bookstore. A woman enters carrying her dog, four year old son in tow. All are wearing designer clothes. The sales associate greets them.

"Do you have any classic Peter Pan?" The woman asks.

The woman follows the sales associate but pauses as they reach the books in a spinner rack. The associate continues on toward the Classics section. She looks at the several editions available, some complete and some abridged with glossy pages and nicely illustrated.

"Oh," she says flatly, "Nothing a four year old can read on his own?"

The sales associate apologizes for the misunderstanding. The woman backtracks to the spinner rack and holds up The Berenstain Bears and the Green-Eyed Monster. "Something classic, like this," she says.

The sales associate suggest that perhaps Disney has an adaptation in that format, but it isn't carried in the store.

"Well, how's a four year old boy supposed to learn about Peter Pan?" she whines."I know parents that have read the story to their children," the sales associate says.

"Really," says the woman, leaving the store thirty degrees colder than when she entered it.

About Me

i'm a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. when I'm not writing middle grade and YA fiction, I review children's books for Guys Lit Wire and my personal review blog, the excelsior file. For views, opinions, and various miscellany visit me at fomagrams

a storyteller is what i am, what i do. visual or verbal, i find stories in everything, every place, in everyone. writer might be a more technical definition of the work i love but it's impossible to separate from everything else.